ShadowProtect Fails Reading Hyper-V Pass-Through Disk

Mark Berry July 8, 2010

I decided to use ShadowProtect to do a physical-to-virtual (P2V) move of an SBS 2003 machine. I booted the SBS 2003 machine from a ShadowProtect 3.5 CD and created offline images of the SBS 2003 partitions. I stored the ShadowProtect images on a simple USB drive formatted with NTFS and a 16KB cluster size. I used the default compression and did not encrypt the backup.

Next I moved the USB drive to a machine running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. In Disk Management, I set the drive Offline, then in Hyper-V Manager I attached the drive to a virtual machine as a pass-through disk. Finally I booted the Hyper-V virtual machine from a ShadowProtect 3.5.2 ISO file.

Custom Format Drive During Server 2008 Install

Mark Berry June 29, 2010

I’m installing SBS 2008 in a Hyper-V VM. I want the system partition to be formatted with 16KB allocation unit (cluster) size. Whether that turns out to be a good idea or not is another discussion. The question here is, how do I even do that during the SBS 2008 installation? The standard “Format” button doesn’t offer the option to change allocation unit size.

Here’s the workaround.

Hyper-V Core Configurator Does Not Show Paused VMs

Mark Berry June 18, 2010

I’ve been running PBX in a Flash under the free version of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 for several months (blogged earlier). This week, I’ve added a couple test machines to the Hyper-V server.

Today I came in to see monitoring emails telling me that PBX had gone off- and online several times overnight. Sure enough, when I pick up the phone:  no dial tone. What happened?

PBX in a Flash as a Virtual Machine, Take 2: Hyper-V

Mark Berry February 16, 2010

Back in November 2008, I blogged  about Setting Up PBX in a Flash, Part 1: Configuring a Virtual Machine. That article discussed running PBX in a Flash (PiaF) under Microsoft Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005. Within a couple weeks, I abandoned the virtual machine approach and published Moving PBX in a Flash from a Virtual to a Physical Machine.

Recently I’ve been testing Microsoft’s free bare-metal hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Especially now that Hyper-V supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux, could Hyper-V be the answer to virtualizing PiaF on a Microsoft platform?

Let’s try it and see what happens.